


tell the blinking satellites overhead about coincidence

by guttersvoice



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Getting a Crush on the Guy You're Blowing Shit Up With, M/M, Underage Drinking (Briefly)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-10
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-08-14 06:36:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8002162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guttersvoice/pseuds/guttersvoice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pain in the ass, running into him again and again. Pain in the ass looking forward to it, and being disappointed when he's not there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell the blinking satellites overhead about coincidence

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty heavily canon-divergent for something that was supposed to be set in the canon setting, but oh well. The main difference is just more time spent on Earth committing terrorist acts against OZ, I guess? Just extend that segment of the timeline to allow for more inter-pilot interaction.
> 
> I started writing this by accident while sleep-deprived, woke up the next day with a couple of the fragments and realised I actually wanted to write it. So now I have, I guess. Enjoy my weirdly specific headcanons?

Conducting missions more quietly - as in, without their Gundams - made it difficult to identify when another pilot was in the same area. So it was reasonable, if unexpected, to find Heero planting explosives in the exact same spot Duo was about to.

Not that he immediately recognised him as Heero, or as someone completing his job for him. He’d been moments from shooting the guy when they made eye contact and the familiarity hit him. Of course, Heero knew him before he even looked. The guy was pretty impossible to trip up most of the time. It took seeing the way his eyes narrowed and his eyebrows drew marginally closer for it to click, for Duo to identify him.

Difficult to mistake those eyes for anyone else. He’d never admit that out loud - less the thought that Heero would misinterpret it and more that he’d pass that on to someone else who would.

“I almost shot you again, you dick.” Getting shot might be a little more inconvenient than shooting someone, but he’d been startled, so it felt like he had at least some right to be indignant. Safety on, gun tucked back inside the jumpsuit he’d ‘borrowed’ for the mission. “The fuck’re you doing here?”

He got a bland look in response before the other pilot went back to fiddling with wires, which was an answer in itself, even if he didn’t much like it.

A few seconds of just standing there were enough to get him antsy, finger tapping restlessly against his leg.

“I’ve already gotten all the other load bearing points done, set for eighteen-hundred, so once you’re done we should get the fuck out of here.” Heero probably knew this, and Duo knew he knew, but talking was enough to focus on for now that he wouldn’t get too jittery. “You got transportation or were you gonna jack one of the really obvious marked vehicles from outside?”

He got a glance up for that, but there was at least a hint of something that might be regret, or guilt, in that look so he considered it a victory.

“Well, I have a mostly legally borrowed van five minute’s walk away. Might be a better plan - it’s mine for the week, so I can drop you anywhere.”

A barely perceptible nod, but still a nod.

Duo hadn’t really wanted to offer Heero a ride, but apparently his runaway mouth had gotten him to that point anyway. It was probably for the best: as fellow Gundam pilots, helping each other out was only ever beneficial, for the cause if nothing else. Maybe he wouldn’t regret it too much afterwards, but the drive was pretty much guaranteed to be awkward at best.

It wasn’t like he didn’t understand that Heero wasn’t as reliant on talking as he was. They were just sociably different enough that it made conversation feel very one-sided. Felt like talking to a wall sometimes, even knowing that Heero was probably even more emotionally responsive than he was. Hard as that was to believe from observation.

Well, maybe spending some time together would help.

A very quiet beep from his wristwatch.

“Hey. Fifteen minutes to get the fuck outta here,” he told Heero, who just pointed at the wedged-open window behind him. The very small window. “Are you kidding? You think I’m gonna fit through there?”

Those fucking eyes again, looking right through him. Felt like he was being appraised.

“Yeah.”

First thing he’d said since they’d bumped into each other, and it was telling Duo he looked like he’d fit through a gap that barely looked wide enough for Heero’s smaller frame.

Actually, now he was looking - Heero had pretty broad shoulders. Sure, he was a fair bit shorter than Duo, but he was kinda built, really. Seemed weird he hadn’t noticed, with the loose vests Heero tended to favour, but now that his arm muscles had the fabric of his stolen uniform almost stretching, tight where Duo’s matching sleeves were loose, it felt a lot more obvious.

This really wasn’t the time to get self-conscious by comparing himself to a literal super-soldier.

Duo hopped up onto the filing cabinet in the corner of the room, and climbed out through the window with ease. Maybe it was bigger than it looked, or something.

He poked his head back through.

“It’s five minutes in a straight line, left from the entrance gates, but there’s a gap in the fence nearer to it. Knock the passenger door twice, then once? Or catch up with me, if you’re nearly done here.”

Another nod. Whatever. He’d done his best to ensure the guy wouldn’t get blown up or caught, short of physically hauling him out of there. Time to go.

It took him three minutes to get to the van, in the end, but running did tend to make a difference. It was plain white, with blacked-out windows, and in the time he’d been gone, someone had written in the filth covering the lower half of it.

‘WISH MY GF WAS AS DIRTY AS THIS’

They’d also drawn a penis.

Duo considered wiping these artistic efforts off, but they probably counted as camouflage of some sort, so he just got the engine running instead.

The radio was a welcome buzz of noise to fill the space, but he was only waiting for two minutes before the knocks came: two, then one, and Heero’s eyes and tilted eyebrows peering in through the window as if he could see through the one-way reflective surface. Duo leaned across and opened the door to let him in.

He’d lost the hat and unzipped his borrowed outfit, sleeves tied round his waist, so he was back with his trademark scruff and vest combo, and now that Duo had noticed them, his arms - and his chest - were actually pretty impressive.

Hard to know whether to be grateful or not that he’d left the bottom half of the technician’s jumpsuit on. The shorts Duo had seen him in before were distressingly clingy, and he didn’t seem much the type for a huge amount of wardrobe variation outside of necessary disguises. Not that he could talk.

Heero looked at him like he was expecting something. Presumably waiting for Duo to start driving.

He let one eyebrow raise, nice and slow.

“Buckle up, then.”

This, of all things, earned him a smile. Looked almost like he was holding in a laugh, even, but he did as he was told, strapping himself in carefully with a click so Duo could feel safe driving away.

Not particularly fast. Looking like they were fleeing the scene of the crime would make it way too obvious once their crime actually -

A low boom, not too far away, followed by several others, and then wailing alarms and the familiar sounds of a building collapsing in on itself.

“Get fucked, OZ,” Duo said, grinning at the pillar of smoke just visible in his wing mirror, and turned up the radio volume. Almost missed Heero’s quiet but unmistakably pleased hum in response before the music and engine combined to drown out most other noise. It was definitely there though. He wasn’t imagining it; when he glanced across he could see Heero’s shoulders shaking with barely-restrained laughter.

It was a nice night for a drive. Duo half-sang along with the songs he knew and hummed to the ones he didn’t, and switched stations every time the news of their job well done broke, and they reached the next town over in no time. Plenty of distance between them and their explosion. Certainly enough to get something to eat, Duo decided, pulling into a fast food place with a drive-thru.

He turned the music down as they approached the order point at a snail’s pace behind a car packed with squalling children, and turned in his seat to look at Heero.

“You want anything?” A mostly blank stare in response. Heero’s eyes flicked to the menu stood behind Duo’s head from his perspective, and then met his again.

“A...burger?” Surprisingly hesitant. So not a blank stare, but maybe a confused, or even nervous one. It was kind of reassuring, really, to know there were some things Heero wasn’t quite perfect at, besides his obvious issues with social interaction. Or maybe he just never usually cared much about what he was putting in his body, as long as it was food.

“I’ll order for you, then,” Duo threw him a wink and rolled up to the first window, rolling his own window down. “You’re not a vegetarian or anything?”

Heero shook his head. The stare had gotten a bit more deer-in-the-headlights. Duo opted to ignore that in favour of listing junk foods he wanted to shove into his face right now.

Less than ten minutes later they were sat in the car park with the interior light casting soft yellow across their laps, and a nice selection of terrible, greasy food laid out across the dashboard for them to pick and choose from.

Normally Duo would focus on eating, and deciding what would keep best as leftovers, but watching Heero Yuy, perfect soldier with all those arm muscles Duo hadn’t noticed before, bite into a burger stacked with every extra Duo could think of? More than a little distracting. His expression was near rapturous. Something Duo could relate to: colony food was lacking at best, even when he had been able to get it. He certainly appreciated it at those times, but Earth food was something else. Maybe it was an L2 thing, and the other colonies had better supply routes due to the moon not being in the way. Maybe it was because Duo had spent his childhood stealing freezepaks without the tech needed to make them properly edible but having to eat them anyway.

Either way, Earth food still felt like something special to him, and Heero’s face now mirrored Duo’s on his first real burger experience. Or at least, how Duo felt his face must have been that time. He couldn’t help but smile too just seeing it, with how stern Heero always seemed to him.

“Shha hua huuer uuh--” he swallowed his mouthful and tried again. “So what were you doing finishing my mission for me, huh?”

A shrug. He’d’ve said more, but Heero was apparently at least aware that you shouldn’t speak with your mouth full, and held up a hand while he chewed to stop Duo from continuing.

“Guess the system screwed up and assigned us the same thing,” he suggested after swallowing. “Or there was nothing else to do today so we got doubled up so no one felt left out.” Another shrug. “Or there’s some ulterior purpose here. It got done, so I don’t really care.”

“Pragmatic as ever, huh?”

Heero hummed in assent, and shifted his attention back to his burger.

“If they did it on purpose they could've at least told us instead of letting me almost kill you out of surprise.”

At this point, Duo was just complaining for the sake of complaining. He didn’t really expect a response beyond maybe a grunt if he was lucky. Just filling the gap between mouthfuls with words.

“But you didn’t kill me,” Heero pointed out.

That shut him up. 

* * *

 The next time it happened, Duo almost had a heart attack.

It was almost three weeks after the first incident, and right where he was supposed to be planting a camera was another, near-identical camera, watching him like a tiny eye in the dark. His face wasn’t covered or anything - for about ten seconds, he thought he’d been caught.

Once he’d found somewhere out of the way to tuck himself into the smallest ball of limbs possible, and let himself start to breathe and think again instead of operating solely on fear-based instincts, it was pretty obvious what had happened. He had a map of the facility labelling all the existing security to avoid, after all.

Just to be sure, he checked a couple of the other spots he was supposed to be hiding cameras, and sure enough, each of them already had one there, near invisible unless you knew what you were looking for.

The third room he checked had a light on and contained a very familiar boy, this time undisguised, fiddling with the lamp in the corner of the room. As the door clicked open he’d pulled out his gun, aiming it right at the centre of Duo’s chest without looking up from what he was doing.

The asshole. Duo needed both hands to install those cameras properly.

“It’s just me.”

He kept one hand up and closed the door behind him with the other. Apparently that was enough for Heero to tuck the handgun into the back of his shorts, but not enough to earn any acknowledgement beyond that.

Duo sent up a silent prayer that the safety was on and there was no chance of Heero shooting his own ass off.

“How many do you have left to do?” he asked, and then rephrased the question more accurately. “Is there any point in me trying to get any done myself, or should I go twiddle my thumbs in my car?”

He couldn’t read the look Heero gave him. There might almost have been a smile there, but it didn’t seem like there should be. It didn’t last, anyway; their eyes met for a split second and Heero went back to neutral-smoulder again.

It was such an obviously unintended smoulder - just a side-effect of untrimmed hair falling into dark, intense eyes - but that only made it worse, really.

“Sectors G through K need covered after this,” he said eventually, tilting the cover on the lamp he’d been bugging till it looked untouched.

“I’ll get I and K then,” Duo offered.

Heero nodded, and followed him out of the room, clicking the light off.

They split apart in the dark, and came back together where sectors H and I met not twenty minutes later.

“All done?”

Heero was lucky Duo had decent night-vision and could see his nod even in the unlit corridor. Pain in the damn ass, working with this guy. Even if he had gotten the job done in less than half the anticipated time. Knowing he was keeping up with Heero had spurred him to work faster and neater than ever.

Not that he’d admit that out loud.

They exited the building the way Duo had entered - through a long-unused cellar that opened up in an apartment building down the street - and soon made their way to where Duo had parked his current car.

Bathed in orange light, in the chill night air, Heero looked smaller.

Not physically. Still as broad, the same height, just.

Lonely, maybe?

Duo pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I need a drink. You wanna make me look less alone at a bar?”

* * *

Turned out, Heero was not particularly susceptible to intoxicants. Something about his childhood training - Duo had been listening, but he’d also been quite drunk from trying to keep up with Heero up to that point, so he hadn’t really absorbed the explanation, just the base facts. Which had apparently bothered him enough to start an impassioned speech about how perfect Heero was, but luckily, he’d been half-dragged, half-carried out of the bar before he could spill any secrets about their identities.

“We probably shouldn’t be drinking at our ages anyway, even if it is legal in this country,” Heero mused, wrestling the keys from Duo’s drunken grip.

“I’ve been drinking since I was twelve,” Duo insisted. If nothing else, he was at least not slurring his words. “Because it’s calories, and you take what you get, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

That unnamable something in Heero’s expression again. Duo barely registered it this time, too busy focusing on fastening his seatbelt and missing with the buckle over and over. A deep breath, and his hands were his again, and he could click the parts into place.

“You really okay to drive?” At least safety was still present in his mind through the alcohol fog.

Heero looked at him, eyebrows raised, and laughed.

Really, genuinely laughed. Duo couldn’t blame him - he must’ve looked a mess like this. Hair coming loose and everything, eyes focusing and unfocusing.

It was a nice laugh. He’d forget a few things about that night, but the laugh was gonna stick around and he knew it immediately.

* * *

The next few months, missions came as normal - go out and destroy this shipment of mobile suits, go slice this building in half, track down this submarine and fuck it up a bit - and it felt good to be piloting properly again. Deathscythe still needed a little care and attention before she’d be in perfect condition, but working with Howard made that a lot easier. He was even getting naps occasionally.

Only a few assignments came that didn’t involve his Gundam, but sure enough, on one of them he and Heero had been given the same instructions again. The professors really needed to step up their game, but he supposed it wasn’t entirely his fault they couldn’t properly communicate.

That time, they both narrowly avoided shooting the other, dumped some very illegal missiles in the ocean, and stole a truck full of mobile suit parts they could split between them. Heero paid for pizza, and they ate it sat on top of the truck in the middle of a field, and didn’t talk about OZ, or Gundams, or politics.

Duo taught Heero some constellations, and Heero taught him facts about the stars in them, and then they went back to their respective safehouses.

At least, Duo presumed Heero was staying in a safehouse. Maybe he’d enrolled in another boarding school under another fake name. Maybe some kindly old couple had taken him in because he looked small, and lost - Duo had used that one a few times before, but at least he left an envelope full of money behind to compensate when he left without warning in the middle of the night. Somehow he couldn’t see Heero doing that.

A little voice in the back of his head reminded him that Heero was more the type to hack into a bank’s database and erase someone’s debt as thanks, and Duo resolved to do that next time. He wasn’t about to get one-upped by even his imagination’s Heero.

* * *

“Why’s it always you?”

They were sat in a booth in an all-night diner for the third time that week, after three separate infiltration missions around the same city were assigned to both of them. Duo pushed the ice in the bottom of his glass around and around with his straw and waited for Heero to respond, but apparently his stack of pancakes was far more interesting than answering a question that, ok, sure, didn’t really have an answer.

“Like, every time someone else has the same mission directives as me, it’s always you,” he continued. He’d run out of food and drink, and he wasn’t about to just sit and watch Heero eat in silence. “Why do I never get paired with Quatre, or Chang, or -- 03?”

Shit, what was his name? They’d not spent much time together, and he was even quieter than Heero, so there’d been no haughty self-introduction like with 05. He’d said his name at some point, but there’d been other things on Duo’s mind at the time.

“Trowa,” Heero offered. That was it. It sounded different when Heero said it. A catch between the ‘t’ and the ‘r’ that wasn’t part of a colony accent Duo could recognise. Probably something echoed from a language that wasn’t a mishmash of dialects like L2 pidgin, but it was hard to tell. Duo was good at picking up and speaking languages, not knowing which was which.

“Yeah. Why not Trowa? It’s weird, right?”

Heero shoved an extra large forkful of pancake into his mouth and shrugged.

Duo ordered himself another root beer float, and did his best not to sulk. He hadn’t really been expecting an answer. He’d just sort of hoped for some kind of response, at least. Just some kind of acknowledgement that the situation was at least a little bit odd. That it was more than just coincidences at this point.

They finished their midnight snacks without another word between them. Duo left a tip, Heero stacked their plates and cups with more practical skill than Duo had expected to see from him.

The night air was warm in this part of the world at this time of year, and Duo almost envied Heero’s bare arms and legs. Almost.

“Hey,” he managed, pushing through the awkwardness that at least he felt had formed between them since their last so-called conversation. “I don’t mind it.”

If they were in a cartoon, a question mark might have appeared above Heero’s head. His expression was almost comically quizzical. A new face to add to the few Duo had seen him make.

“Hanging out with you, I mean,” he explained. It hadn’t been that clear, really, he supposed. “I don’t mind this, I just wanna know, like, why it keeps happening. Maybe if I knew in advance when I was gonna see you, it’d bother me less? I don’t know.”

He’d started rambling at this point, as he tended to around Heero, so it took him a second or two to notice that Heero had stopped walking.

There was that look again. He’d forgotten about it till now. Maybe something like a quiet appraisal? It didn’t seem like a bad look, just one Duo couldn’t easily read. The smallest possible of the head and a - something, he didn’t know, couldn’t name it if he tried, and he was trying - in his eyes and the corners of his lips. Made Duo feel like he was the one being observed and interpreted, in a way he wasn’t used to at all.

“Give me your contact details, then.”

What right did Heero have to make it that simple? Of course it was as easy as actually staying in touch with one another - all the Gundam pilots should, really, now Duo thought about it - but it had just never occurred to him that it was even a possibility. Sure, the channel and encryption he used was confidential, but the five of them were all definitely on the same side. There was no point in keeping that a secret at all.

They exchanged details like normal teenagers exchanging phone numbers or email addresses, if a little more long-winded.

Made Duo kind of nostalgic, but for a life he’d never lived.

He didn’t dwell on it. That kind of thinking never helped anyone.

* * *

Every time either of them got assigned something new, they let the other know. It had initially been a way to prevent them from accidentally shooting the other if they bumped into one another, but it turned out it actually felt nice for Duo to know someone out there knew what kind of ridiculous danger he was putting himself into.

And when he sent a “good luck :)” to Heero, he found himself actually meaning it.

Stranger still - he felt a little disappointed when they weren’t supposed to be doing the same thing at the same time. He’d adjusted to it, or something, and now he missed it.

He would naturally tell the truth if he was asked, but he’d not otherwise admit that he actually might miss Heero himself.

* * *

It happened eventually. Heero sent his latest coordinates and it turned out they’d wound up in the same city again.

Duo didn’t get any mission protocols from G at the usual time. It was hard to accept the sinking feeling that realisation gave him, but harder to deny. He’d found himself looking forward to getting some kind of ridiculous late night junk food with Heero as a reward for a job well done. Looking forward to seeing Heero, even.

Well, that was fine. He could curl up in Deathscythe’s cockpit and actually get a full night’s sleep for once, maybe. If there was a job to do, someone else - someone more capable - was taking care of it.

He definitely didn’t care.

Caring was definitely not why he sprung upright when his turned-down communicator cut off the low radio he’d tuned the secondary channel to with the loud trill of a received message, or why he leapt to run it through the decoder immediately, heart in his throat.

It was just coordinates and a time. No instructions, no detail, no ‘good luck’, which meant it was from Heero, not Professor G.

He hesitated for a while. Something about the situation made it feel like immediately agreeing to go along was too eager, somehow, or - or something. Duo felt like a bit of an idiot for trying to justify that to himself even for a few minutes.

The truth of the matter was, he wanted to go. And lying to himself was just as bad as lying to someone else.

So, less than two hours later, Duo found himself stood outside a very nondescript warehouse. At least, nondescript to undiscerning eyes. The chipped plastic sign on the small side door suggested that it belonged to a company called ‘Oberst & Zimmermann’, because apparently that was subtle enough for OZ. Almost funny, really.

Was he supposed to go in or wait out here?

His question was answered before he even really had time to think about it: someone came out of the door he’d been considering, and his fingers only twitched towards his gun before he realised it was Heero. Again, but this time at least mostly anticipated.

His eyes lit up when he saw Duo. Not a smile, just something brighter about his eyes. Something he’d never seen before, and it made his stomach flip in a distressingly pleasant way.

Ok, so lying to himself was bad, but repressing something wasn’t exactly lying, was it?

Well, that was a lie too.

So maybe there was some attraction there beyond the physical. He could handle it.

“I didn’t think you’d show up,” Heero admitted, leading Duo rapidly away from the warehouse. Same quiet, hard voice as ever. Nothing different there, but knowing that he’d started to develop a feeling that might stray a little beyond camaraderie made it feel different, somehow. “So that full squadron of illegally hidden Leos are rigged to blow in five minutes.”

Duo felt his eyes widen at that. A full squadron was a lot, and promised quite a wide radius of damage. He picked up the pace, and Heero matched him, until they were both running, feet sure and fast on the concrete, leading them both from the dark of that cluster of warehouses to a high-class residential area where the streetlights were just coming on. Duo didn’t realise he was laughing until he skidded past Heero and the slick sportscar he’d stopped at, only tripping over his own feet a little bit.

He didn’t realise Heero was laughing too till he turned to look.

God, if his face lit up when he smiled, his laugh could set cities ablaze.

Hadn’t Duo told himself he could handle this less than a minute ago? His chest pounded, not from the exertion, and he sent up a little prayer that his face wasn’t going red, or if it was that Heero wouldn’t notice, at least.

If he did notice, he didn’t say anything, just let his laugh run out and got into the car after flashing Duo a devastating smile. His face was a little pink too, actually, but likely just from the laughter. He had to believe that was it, at least. False hope was worse than none, so he wouldn’t give himself any.

By the time Duo buckled up, Heero had already hotwired the car, and his expression was back to neutral again. Duo tried not to be too disappointed.

He didn’t really have time to think much on any potential disappointment, because Heero drove with even more reckless abandon than he did. Something he should have expected, with previously observed Heero behaviour, but the acceleration and immediate sharp turn threw most of Duos rational thought out of the window. It had less of an effect on him than that laugh, though, and he knew that whether he wanted to or not. It was just the surprise of it. After the second turn that made Duo grateful for his insistence on seatbelts, his usual enjoyment of high speeds settled back into place. The usual grin twitched back across his lips. Feet kicked up on the dashboard.

No music in Heero’s car, apparently, but that wasn’t a bad thing. He drove louder than Duo, too, but that was to be expected. After a minute, he pushed a button and the roof folded down.

Duo’s braid streamed behind him. Heero’s bangs blew back, letting his eyes properly reflect the streetlights as they zipped past them. Here, the lights were white - Heero’s eyes the colour of the halfway dark sky beyond them. He caught himself staring. Made himself stop, look at anything else, not think about how much more of Heero’s face he could see like this. He had a tiny, crescent-moon scar above his eyebrow.

At that speed, by the time the explosion went off they were far away enough that the noise was muffled and distant. Still made Heero laugh - this one a short, sharp bark of a noise, but it hit Duo in the throat harder than any of the turns they’d made.

When’d he gotten it this bad?

The car ran out of gas fast. It hadn’t exactly been built for practicality, and the tank hadn’t been full when they’d stolen it.

They abandoned it on the side of the road, and continued on foot to the nearest still open fast food place they could find. Burgers again, like the first time. This time they sat under the fluorescent lights on slightly-sticky plastic chairs, and Heero ordered for himself. It hadn’t been that long, really, if Duo thought about it. Still the same quiet bliss at that first bite, though - for both of them, if he was honest, which he always was.

For once, he couldn’t figure out what he wanted to say. Focused instead on getting every last drop of his milkshake, and the ensuing brainfreeze.

“I’ll wait for you, next time,” Heero said between bites. Unexpected enough that the words took Duo a few seconds to comprehend.

“Not like you needed me to help,” he pointed out once he’d figured out what he was getting at, waving a fry in Heero’s general direction and grinning. More relaxed than he’d thought he was.

“So?”

It was an honest response, so Duo figured he might as well match it.

“Well, why would you want me around?” It wasn’t self-deprecating. If he wasn’t needed, that meant he was wanted, which didn’t make sense from his limited perspective at least. Didn’t seem like Heero to want anyone around if he could avoid it, so he wanted to know exactly how wrong he was about that interpretation, at least.

The question just seemed to confuse Heero, though, judging from the way his eyebrows drew together. He sat in silence for almost a full minute, with Duo pinned immobile under his stare.

Felt like he was being evaluated, damn.

“I like spending time with you?” It sounded like a question, rather than a definitive statement. Like Heero wasn’t entirely sure of the answer himself, and his eyes dropped to his food to match that. He followed it up with far more solid words, though: “I like you.”

Duo’s ears burned. Pretty sure he was scarlet from the shoulders up, and grateful that Heero wasn’t looking at him any more. Two slow, easy breaths while looking directly into the plastic face of the smiling mascot of the fast food chain, and he felt less dizzy.

Was this what having a crush felt like for normal people, too? How did they function everyday?

“I like you too,” he replied, and even managed to make it sound casual.

It earned him a smile. Smaller than any he’d seen on Heero, and softer, and a little shy. Made him want to - he didn’t know - do something stupid and impulsive. He resisted the urge, and just smiled back.

They finished eating in mostly silence, the air between them more comfortable than expected, only speaking to agree to leave, and walked together in the dark to find a way back to each of their current hideouts.

Where they found they needed to separate, Heero’s fingers caught on Duo’s upper arm. Gently, just enough to make him turn.

“The first time was a real coincidence, or mistake,” he started, blunt enough that Duo didn’t realise what he was talking about at first. “But I liked it, so I intercepted messages and made it happen again a few times. Sorry.”

He was gone by the time Duo figured out he meant them meeting during jobs. Getting the same missions - Heero had deliberately made sure they shared them. He’d fucking hacked the communications between Duo and Professor G, and shown up to --

To see Duo? To go out and eat with him?

The similarity between what they’d been doing and how he was pretty sure dates worked hit him all at once.

“Well, alright,” he said to the night sky. If he was grinning, or if he was blushing, only the moon and the glittering reflections off the colonies saw it. 

* * *

\-- Message from: 02 (01:35 05/06/195) --

     Bit underhanded. Make it up to me by taking me on a real date sometime? Without the pretense of a mission. :) x

 


End file.
